Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (2 page)

The SAS in the Second World War became the blueprint upon which other special forces around the world are based. This is the first SAS authorized history. It is a cracking good read and made even more fascinating because it is true.

John Slim

Patron

The Special Air Service Regimental Association

Like war itself, battlefield courage takes many forms. This is a book about a style of warfare that was quite different from anything that preceded it, an unexpected species of hero, and perhaps a different sort of bravery.

The Special Air Service pioneered a form of combat that has since become a central component of modern warfare. It began life as a raiding force in the North African desert, but grew into the most formidable commando unit of the Second World War and the prototype for special forces across the world, notably the US Delta Force and Navy SEALs.

Yet throughout the war, and for many years afterward, the activities of this specialized regiment were a closely guarded secret. This book, describing the origins and wartime evolution of the SAS, has been written with full and unprecedented access to the SAS regimental archives—an astonishingly rich trove of unpublished material including top secret reports, memos, private diaries, letters, memoirs, maps, and hundreds of hitherto unseen photographs.

The most important single source has been the SAS War Diary. This is an extraordinary compilation of original documents, gathered by an SAS officer in 1945, bound in a single, leather-clad volume of more than five hundred pages. Held in secrecy for the next seventy years, it is now preserved in the SAS regimental archives.

This is an authorized history, not an official one; I have been generously aided by the SAS Regimental Association at every stage of its production, but the views expressed herein are entirely my own, and not those of the regiment. It is not a comprehensive history. If such a thing were possible, it would be unreadable. For reasons of space and continuity, I have tended to focus on key individuals and events; many men who played gallant roles in the early days of the regiment do not appear in these pages; a few major operations have been omitted, to avoid repetition, as have many minor ones. I have also given more prominence to the British elements of the SAS than their French, Greek, and Belgian counterparts. This is not a specialist military history but a book for the general reader, and I have tried to keep to a minimum the particulars of rank, unit numbers, medal awards, and other military details when these are not essential to the narrative. A full list of wartime SAS operations and the regiment’s roll of honor is included at the end.

Many books have been written about the SAS. Some are excellent, but often these have focused on a single individual, consequently downplaying the impact of others; some veer toward the hagiographic; many are somewhat overmuscled, tending to emphasize machismo at the expense of objectivity, physical strength over the psychological stamina that was the hallmark of the organization in its earliest incarnation. While many members of the wartime SAS exhibited extraordinary qualities, they were also human: flawed, occasionally cruel, and capable of making specular mistakes. The SAS has become a legend, but the true story contains darkness as well as light, tragedy and evil alongside heroism: it is tale of unparalleled bravery and ingenuity, interspersed with moments of rank incompetence, raw brutality, and touching human frailty.

At the time of its founding, the SAS was an experiment, and an unpopular one among many of the more traditional-minded officers in the British Army. The idea of inserting small groups of highly trained men behind enemy lines, to carry out special operations against high-value targets, ran contrary to all the accepted notions of symmetrical warfare, in which armies faced one another across a defined battlefield. Originally a British unit, formed in the North African desert in 1941, the SAS drew fighting men from all over the world: American, Canadian, Irish, Jewish, French, Belgian, Danish, and Greek. The regiment started small, and expanded hugely in the space of three years.

Some exceptional warriors appear only briefly in what follows, but a handful of individuals fought in the SAS from its inception to the war’s end, from the sands of Libya to the coasts of Italy to the hills of France and into Germany. Recruits tended to be unusual to the point of eccentricity, people who did not fit easily into the ranks of the regular army, rogues and reprobates with an instinct for covert war and little time for convention, part soldiers and part spies, rogue warriors. They were, as one former SAS officer put it, “the sweepings of the public schools and the prisons.” Success in the ranks of the SAS required a particular cast of mind, and this book is, in part, an attempt to identify those elusive qualities of character and personality.

At the end of the war the SAS was disbanded, on the erroneous assumption that such specialized troops would no longer be necessary. The importance of special forces in the prosecution of modern war has grown steadily ever since.

In 1947, the SAS was re-formed by the British government as a long-term, deep-penetration commando force. The regiment went on to fight in Korea, Malaya, Oman, Borneo, and Northern Ireland. In 1980, the shadowy unit gained sudden notoriety after an SAS squad successfully stormed the Iranian embassy and liberated 25 hostages, killing 5 of the 6 hostage-takers in 11 minutes. The assault was broadcast live on television, bringing instant worldwide fame to a regiment whose continued existence had been known to few outside the military special operations community.

The techniques employed by the SAS have changed radically over the last seven decades, but its essential nature has altered little since 1941: an elite force deployed on clandestine, highly dangerous missions beyond the scope of conventional forces. Today, special forces are deployed more widely, and more effectively, than ever before. In 2006, the SAS and the US Army Delta Force launched multiple surprise raids against Al Qaeda targets in and around Baghdad that tore apart the terrorists’ leadership structures. At the time of writing, special forces are combating the march of ISIS, the brutal self-styled Islamist caliphate, in Iraq, Syria, and once again in Libya, where the SAS story began seventy-five years ago. The US defense secretary recently described the role of special forces in carrying out missions against ISIS targets: “We have the long reach…You don’t know at night who’s going to be coming in the window. And that’s the sensation that we want all of [ISIS] leadership and followers to have.” That is definition of the role of special forces that David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, would have recognized and applauded.

The SAS was at the sharp end of the war’s toughest assignments, and inflicted immense damage on enemy forces, both material and psychological. In the desert, SAS raiding parties wrecked fleets of aircraft, terrified Rommel’s troops, carried out vital espionage operations, and forged a myth; in Italy they spearheaded the Allied invasion; on or before D-Day, they parachuted into occupied France to conduct guerrilla operations that helped to turn the tide of war. They paid a heavy price, in blood and sanity. The hallucinatory hell of war echoes through these pages, as well as the delight of comradeship, the pleasure in destruction, and the horror of senseless death.

Bravery sometimes comes in unexpected forms, and in places far from the battlefield. The wartime history of the SAS is a rattling adventure story, but in the following pages I have also tried to explore the psychology of secret, unconventional warfare, a particular attitude of mind at a crucial moment in history, and the reactions of ordinary people to extraordinary wartime circumstances.

This is a book about the meaning of courage.

The majority of source material for this book comes from the SAS regimental archives, most notably the War Diary. I am also indebted to those who have preceded me in exploring the history of the regiment, notably Gavin Mortimer, Gordon Stevens, Martin Morgan, Alan Hoe, Damien Lewis, Lorna Almonds Windmill, Stewart McLean, Virginia Cowles, Hamish Ross, Paul McCue, John Lewes, Anthony Kemp, Martin Dillon, Michael Asher, and many others. A great debt is owed to those historians who had the foresight to record, on paper, film, or audiotape, the memories of the participants before it was too late, and I have been fortunate to be able to draw on these. Only a small handful of SAS wartime veterans now remain, and I have spent many happy hours talking about the past with Mike Sadler, Keith Kilby, and Edward Toms. The family of former SAS intelligence officer Robert McCready kindly shared his wartime diaries and other artifacts. Archie Stirling generously enabled me to explore the David Stirling papers. In addition to the unpublished firsthand accounts held in the archives, much valuable information is contained in the postwar memoirs published by several former soldiers, including Malcolm Pleydell, Johnny Cooper, Vladimir Peniakoff, Alan Caillou, David Lloyd Owen, Roy Close, Fitzroy Maclean, and Roy Farran.

On a November evening in 1941, five elderly Bristol Bombay transport aircraft lumbered along the runway of Bagush airfield on the Egyptian coast, and then wheeled into the darkening Mediterranean haze. Each aircraft carried a “stick” of eleven British parachutists, some fifty-five soldiers in all, almost the entire strength of a new, experimental, and intensely secret combat unit: “L Detachment” of the Special Air Service. The SAS.

As the planes rumbled northwest the wind began to pick up, bringing the electric inklings of a brewing storm. The temperature inside dropped quickly as the sun slipped below the desert horizon. It was suddenly intensely cold.

The fledgling SAS was on its first mission. Code-named Operation Squatter, it ran as follows: to parachute at night into the Libyan desert behind enemy lines, infiltrate five airfields on foot, plant explosives on as many German and Italian aircraft as they could find, and then, as the bombs exploded, head south to a rendezvous point deep in the desert where they would be picked up and brought back to safety.

Some of the men strapped in and shivering in the rushing darkness at eighteen thousand feet were regular soldiers, but others were not: their number included a hotel porter, an ice-cream maker, a Scottish aristocrat, and an Irish international rugby player. Some were natural warriors, nerveless and calm, and a few were touched by a sort of martial madness; most were silently petrified, and determined not to show it. None could claim to have been fully prepared for what they were about to do, for the simple reason that no one had ever before attempted a nighttime parachute assault in the North African desert. But a peculiar camaraderie had already taken root, a strange esprit compounded in equal parts of ruthlessness, guile, competitiveness, and collective determination. Before takeoff, the men had been informed that anyone seriously injured on landing would have to be left behind. There is no evidence that any of them found this odd.